refrain in his mind.  They were exactly what they purported to be, dime-novelish, of the deepest hue of yellow, melodramatic in the extreme; but also, to him now, they were grimly apt and premonitorily appropriate.  “Dicing with Death”—­there was not an hour, not a moment in the day, when he was not literally dicing with death; when, with the underworld and the police allied against him, a single false move would lose him the throw that left death the winner!

The risk of the dual life enforced upon him grew daily greater, and in the end there must be the reckoning.  He would have been a madman to have shut his eyes in the face of what was obvious—­but it was worth it all, and in his soul he knew that he would not have had it otherwise even now.  To-night, to-morrow, the day after, would come another letter from the Tocsin, and there would be another “crime” of the Gray Seal’s blazoned in the press—­would that be the last affair, or would there be another—­or to-night, to-morrow, the day after, would he be trapped before even one more letter came!

He shrugged his shoulders, as he ran up the steps of his house.  Those were the stakes that he himself had laid on the table to wager upon the game, he had no quarrel there; but if only, before the end came, or even with the end itself, he could find—­her!

With his latchkey he let himself into the spacious, richly furnished, well-lighted reception hall, and, crossing this, went up the broad staircase, his steps noiseless on the heavy carpet.  Below, faintly, he could hear some of the servants—­they evidently had not heard him close the door behind him.  Discipline was relaxed somewhat, it was quite apparent, with Jason, that peer of butlers, away.  Jason, poor chap, was in the hospital.  Typhoid, they had thought it at first, though it had turned out to be some milder form of infection.  He would be back in a few days now; but meanwhile he missed the old man sorely from the house.

He reached the landing, and, turning, went along the hall to the door of his own particular den, opened the door, closed it behind him—­and in an instant the keen, agile brain, trained to the little things that never escaped it, that daily held his life in the balance, was alert.  The room was unusually dark, even for night-time.  It was as though the window shades had been closely drawn—­a thing Jason never did.  But then Jason wasn’t there!  Jimmie Dale, smiling then a little quizzically at himself, reached up for the electric-light switch beside the door, pressed it—­and, his finger still on the button, whipped his automatic from his pocket with his other hand.  The room was still in darkness.